Ken Burns’
new PBS documentary on Henry David Thoreau will, I hope, earn the great New
England essayist, nature observer, and commentator on the human condition countless
new readers, and/or send others back to his work. As they do so, perhaps they
will see how other writers have followed in his path—few as beneficially or as
powerfully as the American essayist, travel writer, memoirist, and novelist, Edward Hoagland, who died in late February at age 93.
As an
undergrad, I came across his essays as an undergrad and interviewed him for my
college newspaper. Ever since then, whenever a magazine (usually Harper’s)
came out with a new piece by him, I eagerly snatched it up.
Two
anthologies of Hoagland’s nonfiction (The Edward Hoagland Reader and Hoagland On Nature), appearing a quarter century apart, were issued by his
publishers at the time. I hope that a comprehensive career retrospective will
come within the next year or so. It would be a shame for his idiosyncratic but
lyrical voice to die with him, without exposing a new generation of readers to
his work.
Hoagland wrote
half a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. But the average suburban
library is unlikely to hold these on their shelves. (I could find only one, In
the Country of the Blind, in my county system of 78 libraries). As for
publishers: trying to package or market long fiction can be tricky, and so
nonfiction will probably be the realm where most readers will encounter him.
Somehow,
in a book sale or, if necessary, Amazon, I’ll have to hunt for this fiction.
But his nonfiction will still work for me.
Although
his virtues into fiction were not permanently stymied, lack of commercial
success and an inability to project a suitable narrative voice propelled
Hoagland towards nonfiction in the late 1960s. He worked on his third novel, The
Peacock's Tail (1965), set in New York City, he “for five
years and it sold 900 copies,” he told me in the 1980 interview, “so if you
divide the years into 900 you can figure out now much I worked for how
little."
The personal
essay beckoned, Hoagland observed, because he had to “tell my own story, and
also I have the kind of mind that speaks easily in an essay form, in a direct,
preachy tone of voice, I suppose"—in other words, fulfilling what Hoagland
termed "the reformer's impulse," or the urge to tell the world how it
should be.
Quirky and
honest, Hoagland mined for material in multiple aspects of his life: the
straitlaced WASP upbringing that provoked his rebellious instincts, Harvard
literary mentors Archibald MacLeish and John Berryman, working with animals in
a circus, travels to places like British Columbia and Africa, and marital
relations.
Dividing
the year in his prime between Greenwich Village and Vermont, Hoagland hardly
disdained the rich variety of life in cities. “I loved the city like the
country — the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook
— and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good,” he wrote in
his 2001 memoir, Compass Points.
You can’t
consider Hoagland’s life and work without keeping in mind his two disabilities:
one, stuttering, affecting him most at the beginning of his life, and the
other, blindness, in late middle age until his death.
When I met
him, at age 48, his stammer was intermittent but protracted. Even knowing of
his condition beforehand, I felt for him as he struggled to push the words out.
Speech therapy could not eradicate or, it seemed, even ease what he called his
“vocal handcuffs” to any degree.
"Since
I didn't talk so much I had a dialogue in my own mind,” he told me. “Writing is
a kind of dialogue in one's own mind, so it all fitted in, I suppose, with
that."
This
difficulty lent special urgency to his desire to express himself—or, as he put
it in a 1968 Village Voice essay, “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,”
it "made me a desperate, devoted writer at twenty. I worked like a dog,
choosing each word."
One of the
painful ironies of American literature in this past quarter century has been
that this essayist and novelist, who noted in Tigers and Ice
(1999) that “A writer's work is to witness things,” increasingly battled
blindness from late middle age onward.
Even his
worsening medical condition, however, was a matter of rejuvenated appreciation
for nature and physical acceptance. Given a temporary reprieve by successful
midlife eye surgery, he returns to Vermont to see “the juncos wintering in the
dogwoods, the hungry possum nibbling seeds under the birdfeeder, the startling
glory of our skunk’s white web of fur in a shaft of faint moonlight.”
The titles
of three late-life essays in Harper’s—“Last Call,” “Curtain Calls,” and
“Endgame”—testify to his calm, pantheistic acceptance of death, and the hope
that his decomposed body would mix at last with the natural world he had so
long loved.
I find it
hard to accept that I won’t find new work by this unabashedly independent
spirit. But I will continually come back to the rich legacy he left behind, of
essays that contained, as he put it in The Tugman’s Passage, "a
'nap' to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose
ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can't be brushed
flat."
